by Jon Fleetwood, Jon Fleetwood:
The year before COVID-19, DARPA launched a program to predict the wildlife origins of future human pathogens.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched a program in early 2018 called PREventing EMerging Pathogenic Threats (PREEMPT) whose stated goal was to identify and stop future pandemic threats before they entered the human population, according to program documents.
Unlike traditional outbreak investigations, which attempt to reconstruct the animal origins of purported pathogens after outbreaks occur, PREEMPT sought to “predict” those origins in advance.
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In 2018.
The year before the COVID-19 pandemic started.
The year before we were told SARS-CoV-2 came from nature.
DARPA wanted researchers to identify which animals would harbor future threats, which mutations would enable species jumps, which locations would become outbreak hotspots, and under what ecological conditions future human pathogens would emerge from nature.
The agency described the effort as a “radical departure from current practice.”
“The PREEMPT program represents a radical departure from current practice, aiming to target viral biothreats within the animal reservoirs where they originate and preempt their entry into human populations before an outbreak occurs.”
In other words, DARPA was no longer interested merely in responding to purported pandemics after they appeared.
It wanted to predict and characterize them beforehand.
Predicting the Spillover Story Before the Spillover
PREEMPT was not simply a wildlife surveillance program.
DARPA required researchers to build “predictive” models capable of estimating the alleged likelihood that a future human-capable pathogen would emerge from an animal reservoir in a geographic hotspot.
The models were expected to capture viral evolutionary trajectories, species-jump mutations, ecological drivers, transmission bottlenecks, and spillover probability.
Researchers were instructed to combine wildlife surveillance, environmental information, sequencing data, ecological variables, and socioeconomic information into continuously updated predictive systems capable of forecasting future emergence events.
DARPA further encouraged the use of “real-life ecosystems and natural hosts” to experimentally validate these predictions and improve future forecasting accuracy.
Historically, the wildlife origin story of a purported pathogen was reconstructed after the fact.
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